02/26/2016

Well worth the time. Finally, an honest and candid reassessment of Ty Cobb the player and the man. Leerhsen's writing is incisive, terrifically researched, and witty. A fresh wind to dilute the stench of Al Stump's biographical hatchet jobs.

Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, one of the greats. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don’t tell half of Cobb’s tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: “Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam,” one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.

But Cobb was also one of the game’s most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to “create a mental hazard for the other man,” he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster—a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers.

How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb’s journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time, to America’s first true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his times—a man we thought we knew but really didn’t.

02/23/2016

Insightful and at times intriguing, GM: Paint it Red nonetheless suffers, like many memoirs, from the limited perspective of the author only. From the book jacket:

"In a devastating indictment of the GM management system, this insider exposé outlines the $100 Billion fear-driven, top-down boondoggle that didn’t make the news―anywhere. And it was called the Paint Plan. Moving from general corporate engineering to a specialty in environmental issues, the author, Nicholas Kachman, became a quiet but persistent spokesman for common sense solutions to, among other things, the problem of air pollution from the auto painting process. Writing with passion, Kachman equips the reader with the background needed to grasp the folly of the decisions that were made. Even those unfamiliar with air pollution and the auto industry will find the mismanagement lessons broadly applicable."

02/06/2016

Purports to be "the complete story of the SS at individual, unit and organizational levels," but McNab glaringly and inexplicably overlooks the role of the SS in the Final Solution, the architecture and operation of the vast concentration and extermination camp system, and the omnipresent Nazi police state.

02/01/2016

Second time around for me. An exceptionally important book when published and it remains so today. A terrifying catalogue of man's cruelest and basest instincts.

In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (Nanjing) and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured, and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. The crude and barbaric means by which the Japanese army did so confounds imagination. Such wanton, unchecked cruelty exceeded even the systematic killing machine invented by the Nazis and Stalin's own reign of terror.

Amazingly, the story of this atrocity—one of the worst in world history—continues to be largely denied by the Japanese government. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers who performed it; of the Chinese civilians who endured it; and finally of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese.

But this book does more than just narrate details of an orgy of violence; it attempts to analyze the degree to which the Japanese imperial government and its militaristic culture fostered in the Japanese soldier a total disregard for human life. Finally, it tells one more shocking story: Despite the fact that the death toll at Nanking exceeded the immediate deaths from the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (and even the total wartime casualty count of entire European countries), the Cold War led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to court the loyalty of Japan and stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Chang characterized this conspiracy of silence, which persists to this day, as “a second rape.”